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Saturday, October 25, 2008

This isn't an update about art, but about politics.

To think that in barely 11 days, I may see a "black man" become president of the united states is truly and absolutely amazing. I really do love my country. Only 40 years ago, Civil rights ravaged this place, and in only 11 days civil rights helped usher in a man to become a defining president.

I am tremendously excited and in awe that I get to be 22 when I see this day.

Thursday, October 16, 2008

Last time to do three posters! Woohoo. I'm going to rest easy for a while so I can focus on larger projects. I look forward to the upcoming Oscar Wilde book. I'm very excited about illustrating.

Anyways, here are the last two posters.

I decided to take what we learned about design, space, color, and text and try to apply those elements into my usual style of art. That and I was tired of investigating. I just wanted to draw for fun.

This is actually cut out like a comic chat-box, you can see the faint outline. I took the idea from the last drawing I did and implemented it into this. I'll probably keep experimenting with the speech-box and pile of letters. I love the idea and I'm not entirely satisfied with projecting it yet.

Gogol Bordello. DRUM. MICROPHONE. IMMIGRANT PUNK ROCK.

And I leave you with an illustration by my boyfriend. I feel like this right now.

So, in order to work with the moustache wallpaper, I needed to hand draw a couch and livetrace it into an illustration on adobe illustration.

After that, I had to work with the text. Luke began to show me the ways he wanted me to play with it, and put some text on the couch. He also warned me about my white space. So I began to work with those perimeters and finished my final poster.

Were it up to me and I had to design the poster personally, I would not use the wallpaper I made. But, I tried my best to make it work within the time crunch.

Most of this was hand drawn in order to meet the aesthetic quality of the wallpaper. I colored it using photoshop, but fitted it with Illustrator. Text is also by illustrator as are sizings, shapes, etc.

Monday, October 6, 2008

The other day I was thinking about Art History after I finalized my Judith slaying Holofernes paper for the art committee review.

I decided to take famous pieces of art and try to simplify them into shapes, colors and compositions. I started with a quick Da Vinci study.

The idea I had was that this painting is so familiar to people, so ingrained that you would be able to recognize it using only shape and dominating colors, not necessarily finer details/features.

I didn't bother looking at the original painting while I was working on my interpretation. I figured that by doing so I'd be defeating the purpose of my own devices - We remember a specific painting based on shape and color. It wouldn't do to compare what I was working on with Da Vinci until the final product.

This is the finished piece after critique today. The green really brings out the figures. The black background didn't work insomuch the way Da Vinci's does, because I did not use highlights or shades with my shape. So another color is necessary.

Next, I moved onto Van Gogh / Picasso.

I have always been fascinated by Van Gogh's brush strokes, but never have I ever noticed the way Picasso uses invisible shapes, lines, and directions to create a visually complicated and yet excessively simple image. Like the Da Vinci image, after I gathered my sources, I refused to look at either painting as I worked on the piece.

I combined Gogh's brush strokes and Picasso's shapes. I also used Gogh's love for bright contrasting colors. After I finished it, I never had a chance to look at Gogh or Picasso's piece in comparison to mine since I was tired and needed sleep.

I don't know why, but earlier today I was unsatisfied so I tried to make the image my own. Probably because I felt like I was cheating the original composition. That and I wanted to experiment.

Its not nearly as strong as the former and too all over the place. For that, I prefer the former.

For my final piece, I decided to take my personal studies and apply them to an original work. The Vanguard recently had me illustrate the construction of PSU's new Recreational center. So I took the rough sketches and final inks from that picture, and reinterpreted them based on their structure. I chose to use color in my own way, borrowing the scheme from the Da Vinci picture.

I loathed the triangles, so I removed them and heightened the color levels.

It still feels so damn incomplete to me. I don't feel satisfied at all. Probably because I'm not used to working in a simple way. But it is a challenge, and I do enjoy tackling challenges.

Next, I may continue to do studies based on Art History so I have a stronger foundation for composition and how it applies to abstract. My final challenge will be to free hand something without using reference.

Thursday, October 2, 2008

My website's been properly updated with pictures, contacts, and a link to this blog. I'm glad I'm done sweating over its design so I can just chill and read books as part of my study shindig.

Taking a cue from one of the awesome folks in class, here was the process of my last three posters from the 10.01.08 design class.

The first drawing started as a quick airplane sketch about three weeks ago, when I went to Colorado to attend my Grandpa's 80th.

I started toying with the design and altered it overall, going for an Art Nouveau / Alphonse Mucha look last Monday.

While it doesn't show very well scanned, the speech bubble is cut completely out so when you hang it on the wall, you see the wall peaking through the hole. So she literally has nothing to say.

I didn't like it totally, and the critique today helped me realize why it wasn't very strong. The upper hair tendrils guide the eye off the page, so its a bit of a distraction.

I took it under photoshop and edited it a bit. I got rid of her upper hair trails, so it helps keep the eye more involved with the picture.

The second image, I'm especially proud of. I took an old unfinished inking of mine from two years ago and completed it into its final form.

The cacti's name is Senorita.

There's a story involving the cacti :: My boyfriend and I went camping this summer and came across two cacti in Fred Meyer's. He named his Jerome and I named mine Lola. They had a lovely relationship. Jerome was three years old, a Pisces, and wanted to be an astronaut. Lola spoke Spanish so she had little to say. Later, we found out Lola's pretty yellow flower was plastic and hot-glued to her head. Lola was actually a Larry. Jerome was confused and heartbroken that his girlfriend turned out to be his boyfriend, and since then they departed ways.

Lola stays with me. Jerome is at Calarts with McKenzie.

The last picture was also inspired by a rough sketch when I visited Calarts about a month ago.

I'm not as pleased with it and I didn't know why. The critique helped me understand that the composition and directions were too obvious/forced. There's no way I can repair it, but I like the idea of the image nonetheless.